Of Italian heritage, Joe Scuderi was born and raised in Queensland and seemed destined for a successful career as an all-rounder from as early as his school cricketing days. The extent of his potential was first reflected on a national scale with selection as an inductee of the Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide in 1988; so promising did he in fact look at that time that his services duly became the subject of an intense bidding war between Queensland and South Australia in the lead-up to his first class debut (which was ultimately made with the latter) in 1988-89. From that point onward, though, such promise sadly remained substantially unfulfilled. Over the next four seasons, he was a reasonably regular member of South Australia's Sheffield Shield team and was a handy contributor, consistently averaging at close to thirty with both bat and ball. Frustratingly, though, the combination of his very correct technique with the bat and his combative medium pace never took him to the heights that were once imagined. He did string together seven matches in 1996-97 but, aside from that, played a bare six first class matches for the
Redbacks beyond the 1992-93. It is a statistic that is instructive of his
decline. Instead, Scuderi has since had to limit his horizons to Italy's
national team and to the odd appearance for Lancashire at English domestic
level around some league cricket in that county.
John Polack